Field of the Invention
The principles of the present invention relate generally to an improved communications system, and in particular, to an improved system and method for monitoring network performance.
Description of the Related Art
Passive monitoring is a technique used to monitor traffic on a network for performance trending and predictive analysis. Passive monitoring practice periodically monitor packet counters at opposite ends of a network, and use “time stamps” to inject counter frames that start and stop measuring frame loss across a link. Typically the goal is to measure packet loss in very low quantities such as 10-4th or 0.0001% packet loss. The existing passive method uses operations, administration and maintenance (OAM) frames to exchange counters continuously with active probes. However, this method is imperfect due to force insertion of a frame even when frames are sequenced back to back. The result is that counter frames are injected imperfectly which results in frame injection error.
Accordingly, the disclosed embodiments seek to provide one or more systems and methods to alleviate the problems related to the above frame insertion issue.